Western & Oriental Manuscripts

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Lot 19
  • 19

Mivhar ha-Peninim and other philosophical treatises, in Hebrew, manuscript on paper

Estimate
10,000 - 15,000 GBP
bidding is closed

Description

63 leaves, 184mm. by 135mm., apparently complete, collation: i4, ii8, ii2, iv-vi12, vii7 (vii a singleton), viii8, small horizontal catchwords for each folio, written space approximately 70mm. by 120mm. for main part of first text, single column, 22 lines in brown ink in a mixed Ashkenazi-Italian script for same text, with extensive surrounding commentary in smaller script, upper margin trimmed with occasional loss to uppermost line of commentary, a few damp-stains throughout and lower outer corner of 26 leaves renewed with text completed in a contemporary hand, some fading of ink at edges of last leaves, else good condition, strong in limp vellum binding, with small paper ticket on spine with "MONTEFIORE MS. / 266 / HA No. 117 LIBRARY"

Provenance

provenance

1. Written by the professional scribe Isaiah ben Jacob Masseran of Mantua, in 1468 for a client in the vicinity of Trino, Piedmont.

2. Solomon Zalman Hayyim Halberstam (1832-1900); his shelf-number '117'.

5. Sir Moses Montefiore Bart. (1784-1885), acquired from Halberstam's estate in the 1880s. H. Hirschfeld, Descriptive Catalogue of the Hebrew Manuscripts of the Montefiore Library, 1904, no. 266. Montefiore sale in our New York rooms, 27-8 October 2004, lot 223.

Catalogue Note

text

This volume includes a copy of Mivhar ha-Peninim ('A Choice of Pearls'; fols. 1r-26v), a work composed of ethical aphorisms in the form of epigrams, which has been attributed to the early eleventh-century Spanish author Solomon ben Judah ibn Gabirol. The marginal commentary is based on that of Samson of Joigny. This is followed by Alillot Devarim, a satirical anti-rabbinic polemic (fols. 27r-52v), which claims in its title that its author was the (almost certainly fictional) 'Palmon ben Pelet'. The true identity of the author has been a source of debate among modern scholars with Y. Ta-Shema in Alei Sefer 3, 1977, pp. 44-53, identifying him as Ashkenazi, and R. Bonfil in Eshel Beer Sheva 2, 1980, pp. 229-64, placing him in southern Italy in the fourteenth century. These are followed by Ruah Hen (fols. 53r-9v), the anonymous philosophical introduction to Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed, and Ben Porat (fols. 59v-62r), the fourteenth-century Italian philosopher Judah ben Moses Romano's commentary to Maimonides' Mishneh Torah. The volume ends with some short extracts on philosophy.

This philosophical miscellany was copied by the scribe Isaiah ben Jacob Masseran in Trino, Piedmont, in 1468. His name has been struck through in the colophons on fols. 59v and 62r, but the special attention given to the name Isaiah on fol. 59v is highly suggestive of the scribe's identity, and a comparison with other manuscripts known to have been produced by him proves that this is his work. He was a member of a class of highly-skilled refugees who were expelled from the European lands to the north of Italy in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century, and who came to Italy and worked for the well-established Jewish communities there, who had amassed sizeable fortunes as bankers and traders, and could afford to employ professional scribes to produce books for them. He was clearly an itinerant worker, but seems to have operated in and around the duchy of Mantua (an important centre of Jewish cultural life) in the period 1468-1503. Some twenty-one manuscripts in his hand survive, and allow us to see that he was a much sought after artisan, and unlike most of his contemporaries appears to have worked solely as a scribe.